Reunion

Troy Andrews, the horn player better known as Trombone Shorty, and Jonathan Batiste, the hot-shot pianist, first met when they were twelve and eleven, at jazz camp, in their home town of New Orleans. Andrews was already something of a star; he’d been a bandleader since he was six. Batiste had only just taken up the piano, having grown up playing percussion with his family, in the Batiste Brothers Band. Andrews had admirers, a circle of kids who tried to talk the way he did. Batiste kept to himself and didn’t talk at all.

They reconnected in high school, at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, and became friends. Andrews started a band called Orleans Avenue, with Batiste on keys. They skipped classes to teach each other musical tricks. Batiste gave Andrews books and taught him new words. “One was ‘fallacy,’ ” Andrews said the other day. “ ‘Fabricated fallacy.’ That was a trip. I’d hang around him and say something stupid just so he could correct me.” Sometimes Andrews and the others robbed Batiste of his lunch.

Batiste was offered a full ride to Juilliard and went north. Andrews stayed. Batiste blossomed into a jazz virtuoso. (He still performs with a band of Juilliard classmates called Stay Human. They sometimes play guerrilla sets on the subway, in what he calls “love riots.” He’s also the artistic director-at-large at the National Jazz Museum, in Harlem.) Andrews did the New Orleans thing, toured with Lenny Kravitz for two years, and developed a sense of how to do it on a grand scale. “Johnny went to Juilliard, and I went to the school of rock,” Andrews said. The two are now, at twenty-eight and twenty-seven, their generation’s most prominent ambassadors of what’s still possible and fresh in mixing up the music of New Orleans. “I didn’t know what the word ‘genre’ meant till I was twenty years old,” Andrews said.

Andrews and Batiste met up a few weeks ago at Red Bull Studios, on West Eighteenth Street. Andrews was there to help produce a record for the Original Pinettes Brass Band, an all-female group from New Orleans. The Pinettes had won a competition back home, and the prize was a recording session in New York with Trombone Shorty and the rapper and hip-hop producer Mannie Fresh. Batiste, just back in town from Qatar, stopped in to say hello. They hadn’t seen each other since Mardi Gras last year.

Batiste and Andrews embraced. Andrews had on black track pants, orange-black-and-blue Air Jordans, and a gray T-shirt. His upper lip was mottled, like a bruised fruit—a life in brass. Batiste was wearing an Irish cap and a tailored overcoat cinched at the waist with a Royal Army Ordnance Corps belt. Underneath, he wore a blue gingham suit he’d designed himself, cuffs tucked into black boots. He had a melodica in a Rag & Bone shopping bag. “He came up here and became a whole ’nother person,” Andrews said. “You should be in GQ or something.”

“I’m already there,” Batiste said. “We did a shoot. It’s coming out in a couple of months.” He quoted Art Blakey: “They see you before they hear you.”

He went on, “I remember, Troy always used to say, and he said it before the first gig we ever played together—I was fourteen—‘Let’s not make it gigs. Let’s make it a show.’ ”

“You’ve got a long-term memory, man,” Andrews said. “What I remember is, you had an obsession with Alicia Keys. I gave you the CD and all you wanted to do was look at it.”

The Pinettes were finishing up a lunch break. They filed into the recording studio, ten formidable ladies armed with trombones and trumpets, plus a sousaphone, a saxophone, and some drums. Batiste, in his overcoat and hat, sat down, with impeccable posture, at a Fender Rhodes and began vamping something that sounded a little like the theme from “The Flintstones.” The Pinettes started in on their horns. Andrews pushed in next to Batiste and played little keyboard fills with his right hand. Then he stood and gestured for the trumpet in the hands of a teen-age girl in sweats and glasses, named Jazz Henry. She passed it to him and planted a kiss on his neck. He played a few bars, loud and clear, zero to sixty, and then handed it back and went over to play the drums for a while. The jam lasted nearly half an hour, none of it recorded, and then Veronica Downs-Dorsey, the choir director at St. Peter Claver Catholic Church, in New Orleans, and the mother of a Pinette, nudged her way through the room and took over on the Fender Rhodes. Batiste moved to a Hammond B3 organ, Andrews picked up a trumpet, and they played a gospel trio. An unfallacious fabrication, in the extreme. The Pinettes took out their phones to film it. ♦